The Step By Step Guide To Becoming A Great Ball Handler (Full Breakdown + Drills)

If your goal is to become an elite level ball handler, there's a few areas that you need to master. In this video, we're going to go through what those areas are and how you can master them step by step. The first ability that it's crucial to have is ball control. This is really where everything starts as a ball handler is your ability to just keep the ball and move it where you want to move it. But there's a couple areas specifically that you should think about. First of all, this requires more than just you spending time working on drills where you're pounding the basketball. Your hand isn't just on top of the ball, it's also on the side of the ball, under the ball, manipulating it and moving it, different areas. So if you want to really be able to control the ball and have it on a string, you've got to be able to manipulate it. It's important that you work on that. I like to use drills like these in order to work on this skill where we're not just keeping the ball in the same spot, but we're able to move where we want to move it whenever we want to. The next part of ball control that's really important is being able to handle the ball at full speed. A lot of players do stationary drills or drills where they're kind of moving at half speed or 75% speed. They can handle the ball well there, but as soon as they have to hit 100%, they don't have the ability to handle the ball. And that's significant limiting factor. So training while moving as fast as you can and keeping the ball up with your body is a really, really important thing if you want to have ball control in real game situations. The next ability that's crucial to have if you want to be a great ball handler is your ability to change pace, which means your ability to change speed and change height no matter how fast or slow you are. If you play the game at one speed, you're very easy to guard. So your ability to change up your pace and know when to go slow, when to go fast, and when to play in between those two is really, really important. You're essentially able to control your defender based on how you are with your posture and with your speed. When you stand straight up nice and tall, typically that defender is going to relax because you're not at a threat to do anything, and then you'll be able to catch them off guard. When you do hit that low position to accelerate and go. Likewise, dropping into a low position can Force a defender to react and and shift a certain way, anticipating a drive, or just give you a slight advantage to attack a different way or get a shot off, they back up. And your ability to shift between these different speeds and high, low positions is a really important skill to develop. So I think it's really important to work on drills where you're getting into these different positions and you're changing up speeds. The next ability that it's crucial to develop if you want to be a great ball handler is your ability to start and stop and your ability to control your feet when it comes to these things. As simple as it sounds, the game is all about your ability to start and stop. And while this is obvious, a lot of players lack the foot control to be able to do this efficiently. The first area we'll talk about is stops, because it's the most obvious and probably the most easy to tell. So these are your snatches, your inverted drags, your punch dribbles, anything where you're able to come to a stop and get a shot off, or change direction, or just be able to assess what your options are. This requires you to have the physical ability of decelerating, which we'll talk about a little bit later. And this is where the ability to create really comes from, and is you being able to stop, make decisions, change direction, get your shot off. If you're able to control when you can decelerate and when you can change directions, you give yourself way more options to make plays going with that. Having control of your feet on your starts is also really important, and we can see what it does when you're able to efficiently start and control your feet. The next area we'll talk about is your ability to create and break rhythm. Defenders are always subconsciously picking up on the rhythm that you play with. So the better you are at creating rhythm and then breaking it abruptly and catching defenders off guard, the harder it's going to be for defenders to guard you. We're going to talk about creativity a little bit later, but this is why it's so important to be creative and to be unpredictable with your ability to handle the ball. Because if you are, then it's really difficult for defenders to be able to anticipate what you're going to do, and it puts you in the driver's seat as the offensive player. Now let's talk about an area of ball handling that I think a lot of players overlook, and that's overall movement ability. A lot of times when players think about ball handling, they're Just thinking about what their hands are doing. But throughout all of these clips, we can see the value of being able to move at a high level as well. A big part of ball control is being able to control the ball while you're also moving at high speeds, moving in different curved angles, being able to be shifty while also keeping the ball up with you. But if we don't have that movement aspect, and it doesn't matter how good you are at controlling the ball, because you're never going to be able to go anywhere with it. So I love using drills that work on crawl starts where we're in these low positions where we can work on being able to make moves and keep the ball up with us at full speed. I like working on curved angles so that we can work on being able to drive to those curves, which is going to going to happen a lot throughout the game. And then overall working on qualities that are going to make us shifty and better movers. And then of course, making sure that we can control the ball as we're doing these things. The last area I want to talk about is something that I've already mentioned a couple times, and that's creativity. When we watch these clips here. Nothing here is pre planned. Everything is spur of the moment based on what that offensive player is anticipating and reacting to. And they're able to be successful in situations they've probably never seen exactly before because they have the ability to be creative and figure things out on the fly. So if all the drills that you do are pre planned moves where you can just basically set your mind to autopilot and do the same thing over and over again, you're never going to develop this ability to be creative. That's why it's so important that we have freestyles built in to our workouts. We work on being able to add different combinations and being able to switch things up. And of course, it also helps to be able to work against live defense where now you have something to react to. So how can you make sure that you're working on all these qualities and developing your ability to handle the basketball at a high level? Well, the first thing is to make sure that you're targeting these qualities inside of your workouts. So when you're working on ball control, you're working on the ability to manipulate the ball. Are you working on the ability to handle the ball going at full speed? Are you working on your ability to change pace, your ability to drop from being high and relaxed to low and explosive, your ability to go from playing slow to playing really fast and then being able to switch in between that as well? Are you working on your ability to start efficiently in different ways and be able to come to stop so that you can change direction or get into shots or just make decisions in general? Are you working on your ability to be unpredictable and break your rhythm, Being able to set up defenders and catch them off guard because you're able to play with the level of unpredictability? Are you training your ability to be a great mover so your ability to accelerate, decelerate, your ability to play at low angles that are required, your ability to play at curved angles and to be shifty and all the things that go along with being able to move the ball well and can you move fast enough and keep the ball up with you as you're doing this? And lastly, do you train the ability to be creative? So are you working different, freestyle, stringing different things together? Can you walk out of the gym every day and say that you've done something new that you've never tried before when it comes to handling the ball, maybe that's a new combination you've ever done before, just a new move that you're trying? Are you able to be creative in different situations that are going to require it of you? And if you do these things, you're going to become a great ball handler. I've got workouts here on YouTube to target just about all of these. But if you want a step by step system that's going to walk you through exactly how to train this, give the exact workouts to do, then I want you to check out elite ball handling 2.0, which is my ball handling program that I just released. Inside of this program, we hit all these qualities extremely hard in a scientifically backed and fun way, with a lot of unique drills that you've never done before and that you probably won't do anywhere else. On top of that we have film breakdowns, recovery confidence videos, videos on building your mind to become a weapon for you, and so much more on top of all the ball handling stuff that we do. So if your goal is to transform your ball handling, I want you to check out elite ball handling 2.0. That's going to be the top link in my description below. And this is going to be something that's going to help a lot of players to elevate their game. Make sure you drop a Like and subscribe if you're new. I'll talk to you guys soon. Peace.